September 5, 2017 7:47pm EDTSeptember 5, 2017 7:47pm EDTHouston basketball coach Kelvin Sampson was thinking locally — help victims of Hurricane Harvey — when he tweeted out a request for clothing and shoes. The campaign rapidly became a national event that should inspire all of us.Unloading donations for Hurricane Harvey relief(University of Houston Athletics)

Before you read any more of this column, I want you to take a few minutes to scroll through University of Houston men's basketball coach Kelvin Sampson’s Twitter feed.

You will be uplifted by what you see, I promise. A little more than a week ago, Sampson put out a Twitter call to his fellow college basketball coaches, asking for donations up their alley — 20 extra T-shirts and 10 pairs of basketball shoes — to give to the folks who had their lives upended by Hurricane Harvey.

You’ve probably heard about this. The response has been nothing short of incredible.

You’ll have to scroll way, way down to get to Sampson’s original note requesting the help. Between that tweet on Aug. 28 and now, he has retweeted as many responses as possible, and every single response will help restore your faith in the basic goodness of most people.

Yep, the response has been incredible. (Photo courtesy of University of Houston Athletics)

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Amazing, right? Just a tremendous outpouring of support from all corners of the country.

I was in Houston over Labor Day weekend, and I stopped by Sampson’s office at the Guy V. Lewis Development Center on the UH campus to find out how this all started.

Sampson will never forget that moment.

It was Monday, Aug. 28, and Hurricane Harvey had already dumped unimaginable amounts of rain on Houston and the surrounding areas for days. From his front door, Sampson could see the floodwaters encroaching at the end of his street. His house sits on a bit of a crown, so the water stopped about 40 feet away, but his neighborhood started filling up — in his words, “like a bathtub” — and he tracked the rise while watching the water creep up one particular tree.

When he wasn’t standing at his front door, he was watching a local TV station’s coverage of the hurricane’s devastation.

“I was sitting there watching a mother being rescued,” Sampson said. “The water was up above her waist, and she had a little boy on her hip, and she kept readjusting him so he wouldn’t go down into the water. Afterwards, I found out he was a first-grader, and I started thinking. Monday the 28th was that kid’s first day of school, and they made the statement that everything they owned in the world was the clothes on their back.”

He needed to do something, so he called his son, Kellen.

Kellen Sampson is an assistant coach on his dad’s staff at Houston, but he’s also his dad’s go-to idea man for pretty much everything. “Kellen,” he said, “we’ve got to help these people.” As dad paced around his house while on the phone with son — he’s always been a pacer on the phone — the two came up with an idea.

Sampson found a big envelope in his kitchen, so he flipped it over and started writing out what wound up being the tweet he sent out. His daughter, Lauren, handles his social media, so he sent the words to her and she posted the tweet.

Sampson was thinking locally. He figured the response would be good in Louisiana, where Hurricane Katrina will always be fresh in people’s minds, and the surrounding areas. And he asked for T-shirts because every basketball coach has extra T-shirts lying around, from camps or workouts or whatever. Kids like that boy on his mom’s hip would need new T-shirts, right?

“Coaches are, at the end of the day, the reason you coach is to help other people,” Sampson said. “You see a young man come in as a freshman, put him in a culture where he can develop and learn, and his success becomes your reward. We get judged by winning and losing, but you don’t get into coaching to win games. That’s a byproduct of trying to help a young man develop. And I think all coaches are like that, at their core.”

It didn’t take long for Sampson to realize the response wouldn’t be limited to locals, and the response wasn’t just limited to coaches of other men’s basketball teams. Or even coaches at all.

“I started seeing Northwest Kansas Tech women’s team respond, and a small college in Pennsylvania’s lacrosse team,” Sampson said. “In Newburg, Massachusetts, they don’t even have a high school coach, but their team got together. They only got like 30 T-shirts for the year, and they sent us 20 of them. Just so many stories like that.”

It was overwhelming.

These shirts were part of the first wave of donations. (Ryan Fagan/SN)

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By Monday, Sept. 4, Sampson had received more than 1,300 donation commitments via Twitter.

And most of these teams weren’t just sending 20 T-shirts and 10 pairs of shoes. Not even close. Keeping up with the numbers has been tough, but Sampson says they’re expecting upwards of 125,000 donated shirts and as many as 20,000 pairs of shoes. Hurricane Harvey almost completely shut down mail service in the area, so they only had received 35 boxes when I was there Monday.

Service resumed Tuesday, though, and Jeff Conrad, the team’s sports information director, e-mailed to say FedEx and UPS had delivered another 300-plus boxes — not 300-plus shirts, but 300-plus boxes of shirts. As many as 4,000 boxes are expected to arrive. Everything has being staged in the Great Room of the Alumni Center, which is a building over from Sampson’s office, and moved in an 18-wheeler normally reserved for hauling the football team’s equipment.

"I'm overwhelmed in a lot of ways," Sampson says.

Everyone in the University of Houston Athletics family is helping with the sorting process. (Photo courtesy of University of Houston Athletics)

As you can imagine, this massive response has grown the scale pretty significantly from what Sampson originally expected. All of the other coaches at UH have promised to have their athletes help sort the donations (by size and gender), and Sampson has had to reach out to relief centers across the region, not just in Texas but in Louisiana, as well.

Watching this outpouring of support snowball has left Sampson overwhelmed. His challenge has become others’ challenge. For example, NAIA school Montana Tech was Sampson’s first job as a head basketball coach, and not only did the Orediggers promise to send shirts and shoes, but they've challenged the other schools in the Frontier Conference to do the same.

“So we have Carroll College from Helena, Montana, Rocky Mountain from Billings, Western Montana from Helena,” Sampson said. “They all sent something.”

Here’s a breakdown of the donation commitments as of 1:45 p.m. CT Tuesday, from Conrad:

“I think Americans, more than anything else, are good neighbors,” Sampson said. “I see what J.J. Watt has done with the Texans and how much money he’s raised, and the response from all over the country to this little T-shirt and shoe drive we started.”

And it’s only natural to contrast that with what we’ve seen in the country at the other end of the spectrum. Sampson brought this up unprompted during our conversation, and again in the afternoon during his press conference with local media.

“I compare it to what happened in Charlottesville,” he told me, referring to violent demonstrations last month near the University of Virginia campus. “This is America. That’s not America. That’s just a group of people. But the human spirit is connected. We want to help. When we see a neighbor that’s in trouble, we’re going to help them. Charlottesville was divisive, but that is not America. That’s individuals. That’s very, very small. But the way that America has responded to this. J.J.’s deal was huge. He’s raising $17 million (the total was $20 million as of Tuesday evening). We’re just doing something little to help. I just wanted to help that lady’s son who was on her hip, the boy who didn’t have anything left in the world, with a pair of shoes and a T-shirt.”

“Now we’re going to be able to give him two or three pairs of shoes and five or six T-shirts.”

And because of the generosity of people across the country who responded to his request for a little bit of help, they’re going to be able to do the same for thousands and thousands of other boys and girls who lost everything to Hurricane Harvey, too.